Should we buy the Executable or Source version?

Hello everyone,

In the upcoming days, my research group is planing to buy a TOUGHREACT license to model reactive transport of acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines, however we are not 100% sure about the type of code that we should acquire (executable or source). we have read the manuals and all the info posted in Berkely´s web page regarding both options, but we don´t catch the big difference yet. Could anyone help us highlighting the main pros and cons of each code, please?

For example, some specific questions we have are

Does the code selection depend on the number of minerals and aqueous complexes which we want to work in the software with? - Does it depends on the variation of kinetic and thermodynamic values for some specific reaction, for exple pyrite oxidation? - Does it depends on the model size? ... Of course, we would deeply appreciate further comments that you may have about the variables that we have to consider to choose the correct code.

In any case, We pretend to work with windows and do not have so much experience  programing (we are normal users of Phreeqc), So I do not if this also influence in making the decision.

Thanks a lot in advance for your replies and sorry if this is a silly question but we need to be sure in our decision and justify the cost to the faculty, if we took the source version (We are sure that this software will help us a lot for our next research questions)

Best Regards

Diego Bedoya